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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   26585 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023

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Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html

Interesting article, but I'm surprised they didn't mention the large payment Disney is contractually obligated to make for Hulu. Even at the floor valuation $9 billion is a mountain of cash for a company saddled with an enormous debt load from the Fox acquisition and whose net cash flow hasn't been great over the last 7 quarters and has had all the cash they've generated going into debt repayments.

Not to defend Chapek, but seems to me most of Disney’s problems were Iger problems.

  1. Iger did the disastrous Fox deal.

  2. Iger pushed into the disastrous streaming business.

  3. Iger forced a fight with DeSantis over culture war issues that have soiled the Disney brand.

I don’t know why an activist investors hasn’t put two and two together that Iger is the one who needs the boot.

You're forgetting the most important aspect for an entertainment company. Disney under Iger produced good content. Disney under Chapek didn't.

Except Iger was responsible for some horrible content like Star Wars, which he rushed into production - which caused a cascade of production issues and failures. Which then basically killed the movie side

I’m kinda wondering why Disney didn’t look at the cash cow they acquired and turn the actually good parts of the EU(which are after all known quantities) into GoT like series- HBO’s success was about the same time. It seems like an obstinate refusal to do the boring, safe thing made Disney blow what should have been a sure bet.

I think it's a combination of arrogance and general "Prequels PTSD"'.

The arrogance is not just in Iger rushing it to have it out in his time. It's also in the fact that the people on the A-side - the movies - just didn't give a shit about any of this. Joss Whedon admitted as much about the original MCU shows like Agents of Shield. They're lower budget fanfiction that just interfere with their canon (which is the real canon) and may confuse fans but they have to pretend to indulge because some nerds buy the tie-ins. In that way, they treat it much like Lucas did. They just didn't care. Especially since there's just so much you can point to to shit on the EU.

The second thing is that basically everyone old enough to work on these films either hates the Prequels or remembers the absolute, wall-to-wall hate the Prequels got. Simon Pegg is a friend of Abrams and look how he talks about them in an otherwise diplomatic industry.

But people disagree on what exactly was bad about the Prequels. As someone who grew up with them I hated the dialogue and characterization. I was not only fine with but loved the Republic era - plenty of us found some quality in the games, books or The Clone Wars show even if we agreed with the criticisms of the mainline films.

The message Disney apparently took was that they were bad in their essence: people didn't just hate the prequels cause of bad execution, they hated the idea. What everyone wanted more OT-like stuff, fewer Jedi, less of a Republic, more Empire v. Rebels, less shiny CGI Coruscant so give them a ton of that, at least at the start. Well, that led to the derivative mess we got and the insistence on movies like Rogue One and Solo which all stayed in the very safe "post-Revenge of the Sith, pre-A New Hope" space.

Which would have perhaps been survivable (The Force Awakens made too much money) but the rush meant no ability to plan for a coherent trilogy and each movie not only pissed off fans of anything original, it even pissed off fans of the previous movie.

The prequels were bloated movies with a decent concept and terrible execution. A strong editor and better action would’ve led to a great set of movies.

The sequels lacked even the decent concept.

A better editor would have helped, yes, but IMO the critical flaw in the Prequels was that George Lucas originally intended for the Big Bad Guy to be Darth Jar Jar Binks. The theory is that he chickened out when he saw the overwhelmingly bad fan reaction to the character in The Phantom Menace. But ironically the only thing that would have redeemed the character and the whole trilogy is if this bumbling idiot was just a Kaiser Soze-esque mask for Palpatine's master. Cowardly scrapping that left Episode II without a memorable villain.

For those who haven't seen it already: https://old.reddit.com/r/StarWars/comments/3qvj6w/theory_jar_jar_binks_was_a_trained_force_user/

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The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT" (not least because that's how Lucas told Zahn to write it). Unlike the chaos they got with total improvisation, the structure would have guaranteed some story coherence. And when I reread the books recently I was struck at how naturally they flow with the OT and how well they maintain the characterization. Luke doesn't feel like a completely different person, which is apparently not something to be taken for granted.

And as much as you can tax the EU of being bad or at least not good enough to fit on the silver screen (a debatable proposition given what we got instead), the Zahn trilogy is pretty universally beloved. I haven't met a prequel hater that doesn't at least recognize Thrawn as a memorable character. And I've actually met many who prefer the more mystic, weird and scruffy continuity of the Zahn sequels to the cleaner, sanitized and mighty setting the prequels had to depict.

They could even have had their cake and eaten it too, by just cribbing the narrative structure and characters and done a free adaptation of the EU, which is what they ended up having to do as a crutch anyways. TLJ being a midwit version of Kotor 2 and ROS being bargain bin Dark Empire.

The stupid part is that for all intents and purposes, the EU draft for star wars sequels in the Zahn trilogy is very much "more of the OT"

It's different in many ways. "More OT"' in the case of the Sequel Trilogy is literally "no, everything we can possibly roll back to then we will", in some sort of childlike desire to relive things exactly as they were, regardless of how it distorts the story. Republic? Gone despite what it does to the heroes' sacrifices. Han's character development? Gone. Leia's Jedi nature? Meh. The Jedi..come on.

This is silly because people want growth, but if it was rational I wouldn't call it PTSD.

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Kotor was such an amazing game. I for one would love to see a Revan series.

Early Iger or late? Disney don't have much good content since the great wokisation began in the mid 2010-s

It is clear from the article that Iger is very much a social creature. So when the environment went woke so did Iger.

Is that really true? Sure the stuff Disney has put out is garbage. But it’s because of the people Iger put in charge.

Also Disney is unique. They make a lot from parks. Chapek didn’t do a great job there though.

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